Letting What's True Be True

I’ve been feeling the pull to write for a few weeks now and was given some encouragement by a business advisor to just sit down and get into a practice of writing without needing to craft it or massage it into a social media post or a blog or anything at all. Just let the words flow.

Now that I think about it, that’s actually been one of the core lessons that I’ve been learning over the past 6 months–stop trying to mold reality (read: yourself) to fit what you think it should be and start allowing what is true to be true. 

Truth is a funny thing. I’m no philosopher, but I’ve noticed over the past few years a more public discourse around the nature of truth and facts and who gets to decide what is true. I don’t want to focus on the political arguments, but rather to explore how truth has shown up in my own life over the past year. 

In August of 2023, my romantic relationship ended after coming to grips with the truth that we were fundamentally incompatible and looking for different things in life and in relationship. In the month that followed, I got into a car accident a week before I was planning to buy a new car and trade the old one in, I discovered black mold in my basement, and my boss (who I loved and respected) quit suddenly leaving me to fend for myself in an organization that was riddled with problems. 

This series of events led to me encountering a deeper truth–the truth that we actually have much less control over our lives than we like to think. Taking blow after blow in quick succession like that, I finally released the reins completely and laid myself down in surrender. I gave it up to a higher power and I trusted that somehow this was all happening “for” me, not “to” me. I looked for the gift and opportunity in it. 

I went to meet with my new massage therapist and when I explained that I had just been in a car crash, she let me know that my state has a budget for helping people who have been in car accidents get well through bodywork. So I was able to see her once a week for several months at no cost to me–something I never would have been able to afford on my own if I hadn’t been in the crash. Plus I got an insurance settlement that I used as a deposit on the new car!

I also remembered a family friend who ran a mold remediation company for many years and called him up for advice. He let me know what I could do to deal with the mold issue and I was able to resolve it much more easily and quickly than I thought. 

And with the job, I came to a place of acceptance of the truth that it was not a fit for me the way it was structured. Fully prepared to end the working relationship with no backup plan in place, I went into a meeting with my new boss and shared with him all the things that were not aligned between myself and the company/my role and what would need to change in order for me to be able to stay. I was 100% sure that he would tell me it just wasn’t a fit and we would part ways by the end of that conversation. But instead, he acknowledged my observations and accommodated every single one of my requests. 

As I started to get my feet under me again over the next few months, I was confronted with another truth. One of my requests of my boss had been to get certified in a team development tool called the Kolbe. As part of that certification, I had the opportunity to learn about my own natural way of getting things done in the workplace and to compare that with what my role was demanding of me. Sitting in a conference room in Phoenix, AZ, the founder of the program, Kathy Kolbe, was demonstrating for us how this tool could give us insight about when we have people on our team who are in the wrong roles. She asked if anyone had a midrange level of mismatch and I raised my hand. She took a look at my report and proclaimed, “Your situation is actually one of the worst kinds. Can anyone tell me why?” 

It turns out that when your natural way of doing things is out of alignment with what is required of you every day, but it’s not in so dramatic a way that the pain of the mismatch makes you demand a change, you end up like the story of the frog in the pot of boiling water–slowly getting cooked without realizing it until it’s too late.

Thankfully, I did realize that I was getting cooked and when I returned from Phoenix, I brought it up with my boss. I told him that I couldn’t keep going at the pace I was going, and that there were pieces of my role that were draining my energy every single day. He heard me out, nodded empathetically, and nothing changed. Month after month nothing changed. That’s when I started ignoring the truth. 

I knew that I was tired on a soul level, weary and battered from the events of the past few months. I heard the call to do something else in my career, but I was scared. It felt like it was safe to stay where I was. I got a steady paycheck that covered my expenses and then some. But the truth is, I was slowly boiling. 

It took another tear-filled conversation several months later for my boss to finally agree to add a team member to help me out. “Great!” I thought, “now I’ll finally be able to take a breath and focus on the parts of the work that I’m most suited to”. 

If you’ve ever hired someone for a new role, though, you know that creating the job description, outlining the interview process, and conducting the search can be a part-time job in itself! I pushed myself, and made it through that phase. Finally, I had a candidate, I made an offer, and she started work. She was eager and intelligent, but had no prior experience in the field. So I was training her up from scratch, while continuing to juggle all the balls I’d been frantically keeping in the air for 8 months. 

Shadowing one of our planning calls where I was sharing my screen as I clicked around and switched between documents at a frenetic pace, the new hire observed, “Wow. Jess moves so fast!” The truth, though, was that I was in a state of hyperarousal and had been for a long time. Hyperarousal is a nervous system state where you are in fight/flight, moving rapidly to deal with the perceived danger in front of you. 

The trouble with being in hyperarousal for an extended period of time is that your body is not meant to function at such a high level of stress and dysregulation for that long. Humans evolved to identify potential threats in our environment, run, fight, or play dead, and then come back to equilibrium. These are short-term bursts where our systems are flooded with stress hormones, our muscles tense up, and non-survival related functions in the body (like digestion) are put on the backburner. 

I had been dealing with some chronic pain issues for a few years–TMJ, plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendinitis–but suddenly I was experiencing intense pain in my glutes that would come and go, and then in my forearms. It felt like I was playing whack-a-mole. “What the hell?! This is not normal for a healthy 40 year old!” I wailed in my doctor’s office. We ran blood tests, did x-rays, and I desperately searched for answers and relief.

Then one day I was in a session with my therapist and I told her that it felt like there was an alarm blaring in my head. Red lights blinking, siren wailing, and a mechanical voice broadcasting the message “Crisis. Crisis. Crisis”. She paused and asked me, “What if you listened to that message? What would you do?”

“Take a month off,” I responded. Which felt so completely out of reach, that I actually laughed it off. But she persisted. With her help, I devised a plan to request to use my 9 days of PTO at the end of the following week so that I could wrap up some loose ends before I was out of office. 

Talking to a few friends later that night, they asked me why I was planning to wait a week to take the time. “Because it would be better for the company,” I replied. “What’s better for YOU?” they asked. 

The truth was, I couldn’t even make it through the following day of work before my body said NO. I went on leave that same day.

I ended up taking 3 months of short term disability, getting diagnosed with fibromyalgia, quitting my job, and recovering from burnout. It turns out that when you live in a state of chronic stress, your body can only take so much before it gets louder and louder and forces you to slow down. 

Working with a healer during my recovery, I gave voice to the biggest lesson I had learned from all that had happened. It bubbled up from my toes, tickling my insides as it rose higher and higher throughout my body, until it burst from my mouth, “I MATTER! My needs matter. My health matters. My desires matter. My pain matters. My rest matters. I matter, damn it!” 

And you matter too. Please don’t learn the hard way like I did, my friends. Take the messages your body is sending you seriously. Look for what’s true. Listen to it. Trust it. Courageously follow it. Be grateful for it.